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The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies.

The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That’s based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed.

Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.

Earlier this year, the European Union enacted rules that would eventually require firms to disclose carbon emissions and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the state of California are looking at similar regulations.

Study co-author Christian Leuz, a finance and accounting professor at the University of Chicago, said the idea “of shining the light on corporate activities that have costs to society is very powerful, but it is not enough to save the planet.” An earlier study of his found that after fracking firms disclosed their pollution rates, those contamination levels dropped 10% to 15%, he said.

The idea is consumers and stockholders would see the damage and pressure firms to be cleaner, Leuz said.

Outside economists agreed.

Leuz and his colleagues used a private analysis firm that finds or estimates carbon emissions of some publicly owned companies and analyzed the carbon pollution from 14,879 firms. Then they compared them to company revenues and profits.

That calculation shows “which activities are particularly costly to society from a climate perspective,” Leuz said. Still, he cautioned that “it would not be correct to just blame the companies. It is not possible to divide responsibility for these damages between the firms that make the products and consumers who buy them.”

The calculations are for only a fraction of the world’s corporations, with many public companies not included and private firms not listed at all, Leuz said.

The economists didn’t identify or tease out single companies but instead grouped firms by industry and by country. And they only used direct emissions, not what happens downstream. So the gas in a person’s car does not count toward an oil company’s emissions or corporate carbon damages.

The calculations use the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s $190 cost per ton for carbon dioxide emissions and the study doesn’t give a bottom line number in dollars, just in percent of profit and revenues. Only when asked by The Associated Press did Leuz estimate it in the trillions of dollars.

At $190 a ton, the utility industry averaged damages more than twice its profits. Materials manufacturing, energy and transportation industries all had average damages that exceeded their profits.

On the opposite end, the banking and insurance industries averaged climate damages that were less than 1% of their profits.

When looking at companies based on countries, Russia and Indonesia were the top for corporate climate damages, while the United Kingdom and the United States were the lowest. Leuz said that reflects the age and efficiency of the companies and which type of industries were based in countries.

Several outside experts said the study made sense within certain limits, while a few found faults with some of the choices of what to count, saying not counting downstream emissions is a problem. Because it doesn’t count those it “does not provide an incentive to reduce these to the level needed,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, which studies global emissions and reduction efforts.

“The results are important but perhaps not that surprising,” said Stanford University economist Marshall Burke. “The bigger take-home is the number of caveats that are needed to do this analysis, indicating what a mess our emissions accounting systems currently are.”

Appalachian State University’s Gregg Marland, who helps track global emissions by country, said “good numbers do allow us to know who is producing the products that consumers want with the least contribution to climate change.”

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Romer, formerly of the World Bank and now at Boston College, said the damage estimates are useful but need to be interpreted accurately, “without the moralistic framing and induced urge to punish.”

Romer used the example of his move from New York to Boston. The initial move would go under the moving company’s corporate carbon damage, but when he took some books from his home they would not. Misusing corporate carbon damage figures could put the moving company out of business and he’d drive his stuff instead, so total carbon emissions would not be changed. Shifting to zero carbon fuel makes more sense, he said.

SEATTLE — With the International Space Station (ISS) scheduled to retire in 2030, NASA is placing a huge emphasis on a seamless shift to future private space stations in low-Earth orbit. Many details of that transition are still being worked out, agency officials say.

“The reason this is so important is because we do believe that the impact of a gap will be disruptive,” said ISS director, Robyn Gatens, during a panel discussion at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference earlier this month.

A few key players who could be impacted by that “gap” include scientists looking to send research experiments to space as well as crew and cargo transportation providers. Given NASA’s expected two-year transition period, a commercial successor must be operating by 2028 to prevent any such complications.

To plan for a smooth shift of research and operations to private space stations by 2030, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a strategy in March of this year that outlines a plan of action. The policy’s overlying objective is for the U.S. to lead in “an emerging marketplace run by commercial and private enterprises engaged in LEO,” ultimately allowing NASA to maintain an “uninterrupted U.S. presence” in low-Earth orbit.

Related: NASA looks to private outposts to build on International Space Station’s legacy

“The reason we at the White House level released a policy on this topic this year is to prepare seven years in advance, so that we do not have to plan for a scenario where there’s a gap,” Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, an assistant director for space policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the conference.

Because commercial space station services is still an unproven market, however, carrying out such a seamless transition will not be without its challenges. For instance, experts will need to worry about things like technical costs and scheduling risks in terms of design and development of the space station platforms, John Mulholland, the Boeing program manager for the ISS program, said at the conference. “They will get there but it will not be easy.”

Mulholland also underscored the need for increasing the budget for the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft expected to dock on the ISS before performing a safe deorbit and re-entry sequence back to Earth. (NASA is expected to award the contract for the design and production of this vehicle in March 2024).

The new funds are also likely to be used for an upgrade that significantly improves the science capability of a physics instrument on the ISS that hunts for dark matter, cosmic rays and antimatter galaxies. The detector, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), was installed as an external module on the ISS in 2011. Its upgrade is expected to take an entire cargo flight, which “deserves a plus-up in the budget ahead,” Mulholland said.

With a majority of the research on the ISS funded by the federal government, and the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 suspending the debt ceiling until the end of 2024, “we will be faced with difficult budget cycles in the near future,” he said.

Angela Hart, manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program, said the space agency will pass on its expertise in technology to private space station providers, but such responsibility and involvement will decrease as the latter finds surer footing. Over the next year, NASA will focus on working with partners and the science community to avoid cost overruns and schedule issues, she explained during a talk on Aug. 3.

After the ISS retires in 2030, NASA is likely to operate a national laboratory that would support various commercial platforms. Although details are few, the LEO National Lab, which is still a working name referring to “low-Earth orbit,” is expected to represent all government-sponsored research to be carried out on a combination of available private space stations.

“The idea is that it would be platform agnostic. So it’s not a single place, it’s not a single laboratory,” said Gatens. “One really important tenet that we’re looking at is it needs to support but not compete with commercial platforms and service providers.”

Currently, ISS partners including Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency (ESA) have committed to support the ISS until its phased retirement operation planned for 2030. Russia has confirmed its support only until 2028, however, after which it will focus on building its own orbital space station, whose first module is expected to launch in 2027.

On Friday, the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco was briefly clogged with traffic after autonomous taxis froze at a busy intersection. The jam consisted of at least 10 driverless Chevy Bolts operated by Cruise, General Motors‘ self-driving car subsidiary. 

“One of them was stopped at the top of the hill for no apparent reason,” witness Valerie Jacobson told NBC Bay Area.

The mishap coincided with a music festival taking place in nearby Golden Gate Park. Cruise blamed the festival for interfering with network connections to the cars.

“A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were impacted,” said a statement put out by Cruise on social media.

The cluster comes just a day after the state’s Public Utilities Commission ruled 3-1 in favor of letting Cruise and Waymo expand their driverless taxi operations. Waymo is owned by Alphabet, parent company of Google, and uses Jaguar I-Pace electric crossovers. The ruling allowed the companies to conduct robotaxi operations 24/7 throughout San Francisco.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin cautioned that “these things are not ready for prime time,” when speaking to NBC Bay Area. “[It’s] scary as heck if you think about the fact that moving these vehicles out of traffic requires cell service,” he added.

Peskin pointed out that cell service disruption could occur because of a natural disaster. In a situation like that the driverless cars could prevent emergency vehicles from getting through, or block evacuation routes. In an interview with ABC7 San Francisco, he drove the point home: “If there’s a power outage or if there’s a natural disaster like we just saw in Lahaina that these cars could congest our streets at the precise time when we would be needing to deploy emergency apparatus.”

Though the traffic jam cleared after about 20 minutes, this isn’t the first time robotaxis have caused confusion in situations that human drivers would have been able to figure out in seconds. When a robotaxi encounters a confusing situation, it seems to default to simply stopping.

In April, a Cruise robotaxi collided with a city bus, and another was unable to follow a police officer’s instructions to pull over. A similar Cruise traffic jam of eight vehicles blocked city streets for hours last summer, but the cause was never explained. Last December, NHTSA opened an investigation into Cruise for its vehicles’ greater-than-average rate of hard braking and immobilization.

Internet of things devices have been plagued by security issues and unfixed vulnerabilities for more than a decade, fueling botnets, facilitating government surveillance, and exposing institutional networks and individual users around the world. But many manufacturers have been slow to improve their practices and invest in raising the bar. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, researchers from Panasonic laid out the company’s strategy for improving IoT defenses based on a five-year project to gather and analyze data on how the company’s own products are attacked.

The researchers use Panasonic home appliances and other internet-connected electronics made by the company to create honeypots that lure real-world attackers to exploit the devices. This way Panasonic can capture current strains of malware and analyze them. Such IoT threat intelligence work is rare from a legacy manufacturer, but Panasonic says it would like to share its findings and collaborate with other companies so the industry can start to compile a broader view of the latest threats across products.

“Attack cycles are becoming faster. And now the malware is becoming all the more complicated and complex,” says Yuki Osawa, chief engineer at Panasonic who spoke with WIRED ahead of the conference through an interpreter. “Traditionally, IoT malware is rather simple. What we are afraid of most is that some kind of a cutting-edge, most advanced type of malware will also target IoT. So there is importance to protect [against] malware even after the product is shipped.”

Panasonic calls its efforts to track threats and develop countermeasures “ASTIRA,” a portmanteau of the Buddhist demigods known as “asura” and “threat intelligence.” And insights from ASTIRA feed into the IoT security solution known as “Threat Resilience and Immunity Module,” or THREIM, which works to detect and block malware on Panasonic devices. In an analysis of Panasonic products running ARM processors, Osawa says, the malware detection rate was about 86 percent for 1,800 malware samples from the ASTIRA honeypots.

“We use the technology to immunize our IoT devices just like protecting humans from the Covid-19 infection,” Osawa says. “These anti-malware functions are built in, no installation required and [they] are very lightweight. It doesn’t affect the capability of the device itself.”

Osawa emphasizes that the ability to push patches to IoT devices is important—a capability that is often lacking in the industry as a whole. But he notes that Panasonic doesn’t always see firmware updates as a feasible solution to dealing with IoT security issues. This is because, in the company’s view, end users don’t have adequate education about the need to install updates on their embedded devices, and not all updates can be delivered automatically without user involvement.

For this reason, Panasonic’s approach melds shipping patches with built-in malware detection and defense. And Osawa emphasizes that Panasonic views it as the manufacturer’s responsibility to develop a security strategy for its products rather than relying on third-party security solutions to defend IoT. He says that this way, vendors can determine a “reasonable level of security” for each product based on its design and the threats it faces. And he adds that by deploying its own solutions out of the box, manufacturers can avoid having to share trade secrets with outside organizations.

“Manufacturers ourselves have to be responsible for developing and providing these security solutions,” Osawa says. “I’m not saying that we’re going to do everything ourselves but we need to have a firm collaboration with third-party security solution vendors. The reason why we make it built in is that inside of the devices, [there are] secrets and we don’t have to open it. We can keep it black box and still we can provide the security as well.”

Developing threat intelligence capabilities for IoT is a crucial step in improving the state of defense for the devices overall. But independent security researchers who have long railed against IoT’s black box model of security through obscurity may take issue with Panasonic’s strategy.